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Friday, 2 August 2013

Fragile Empire by Ben Judah - a review of the latest book about Putin

‘If you read twenty five books about foreign policy this year,
make one of them Ben Judah’sFragile
Empire’. Not exactly the words of Foreign Policy magazine, and the
book, subtitledHow Russia
fell in and out of love with Vladimir Putin, has attracted praise from a number of reviewers.

The author’s central thesis isn’t quite the re-tread of worn-out
clichés about the Russian president as manipulative, all-powerful
dictator, that you’ll find in Masha Gessen’sMan
Without a Faceor countless
other works. In fact Judah believes that Putin has failed to build a
strong, centralised system and, as a result, both his personal political
authority and the integrity of the state he rules are under threat.

I didn’t expect to accept this argument wholesale, and nor did I,
but the book was far from irredeemable. It forms a reasonable account of
the protests which developed in Moscow and other large cities last winter, and,
although Judah clearly has sympathy with the demonstrators, he describes fairly
why the movement did not amount to a credible opposition to Putin.

Unfortunately, whileFragile
Empiregives a diverting, if
contestable, account of the President’s rise and some absorbing reporting from
a country growing disillusioned with United Russia, it does not treat seriously
enough Putin’s achievements, preferring to write them off as luck, and it does
not credit his political project with any underlying philosophy.
Actually, the book is rather flabby around the middle and it could have done with
better editing and proof reading, as there are plenty of typos, repetitions and
confusing sentences.

Judah’s portrait of the young Putin is more believable
and briefer than Gessen’s, although it is similar. He at least bothers to
track down the future president’s teacher, to offer some fond but hazy memories
of her former pupil. The broad outline is familiar- the tough childhood
in post-war St Petersburg, the schoolyard brawling and a precocious attempt to
join the KGB as a teenager.

Fragile Empiredoesn’t quite subscribe to the conspiracy
theories which depict Putin’s career as the outcome of a Machiavellian, Chekist
plot. Indeed the author is more inclined to portray a hapless, though
resilient, opportunist, who was slow to grasp the opportunities offered by
post-Soviet Russia, but managed eventually to drag himself back from a ruined
career.

Rather than strength, he describes weakness, rather than a hunger
for power, he describes fear of the consequences of losing it and rather than
an authoritarian state, he describes a leader who cannot control his
subordinates. In this telling of the Vladimir Putin story, the President
is not a powerful tyrant who menaces the West, but an insecure thief, who
cannot step aside because he is terrified of getting his comeuppance.

While Judah might be good at picking holes in the network of
patronage represented by United Russia, he is unconvincingly dismissive of the
regime’s successes. He is willing to accord some of the economic success
in Putin’s Russia to ‘liberalisation’, but he largely puts stabilising the
world’s largest country down to being in the right place at the right time.

Neither does he offer a serious critique of the political thinking
behind ‘Putinism’, unlike, for instance, Richard Sakwa inThe Crisis of Russian Democracy.
In Judah’s assessment, the President is simply at the apex of a
kleptocracy, whose concepts of ‘managed democracy’, ‘the dictatorship of the
law’ and ‘the power vertical’ are just hollow phrases, designed to keep assets
flowing in his direction.

That bleak cynicism might reflect recent disillusionment with
United Russia, but it can’t explain why Putin, as an individual, is still
supported by a majority of Russians, after 14 years at the top of public
life. There is no serious reflection inFragile
Empireon the President’s
attempts to rebuild sovereignty, after inheriting a state where it had been
strewn, haphazardly across countless regions and republics. Judah doesn’t
try to fit some of Putin’s more draconian policies – appointing governors, requiring a minimum threshold of support for political parties - into any type
of context.

Certainly, he is entitled to argue that the President failed in his
projects, but he doesn’t really bother to investigate whether there was any
rationale behind these actions in the first place. And he doesn't sufficiently acknowledge that, even if the grand larceny he alleges did take place, enough money was left over to build up enormous reserves, raise living standards substantially and leave Russia the least indebted country in the G20.

Fragile Empire becomes most interesting when it starts
to deal with Putin’s opponents and the protests which gained momentum after the
State Duma elections in 2011. Judah
interviews opposition figures from Berezovsky to Navalny and he even
corresponds with the gaoled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Although the author is clearly sympathetic to the opposition, he
doesn’t make excuses for its leaders. He
portrays Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky as wealthy manipulators, eager to use
their riches to warp the political process, he paints Boris Nemtsov as an
unappealing fop, who cannot connect with the wider public and he describes
Navlny’s past, with all its inflammatory rhetoric and fire-arms incidents.

Indeed, while Judah enthuses about the mood which brought
demonstrators to the streets, he acknowledges that there is no common purpose or
viable leadership in the opposition movement.
The Moscow liberals, whom he says formed the back-bone of the
demonstrations in the capital, had little in common with, or interest in, less cosmopolitan
Russians beyond the Garden Ring. They
rubbed shoulders at these events with nationalists demanding the reinstatement
of Tsarist autocracy, quasi-fascists and communists. There were no coherent demands, no leaders who
could capture attention beyond the capital and no electoral vehicle to harness
anti-United Russia feeling.

Even the movement's brightest star, Navlny, was an obscure figure outside Moscow, attracting the derision of regional protesters, who alleged that he didn't care about them.

A major flaw with the book, is that it appears to overstate
Putin’s decline. The latest polls from the Levada Centre show that he has a 65%
approval rating, which is a small improvement on last month and largely in line
with figures from this time last year. Those are numbers which most politicians would kill for. The idea that there is no longer a ‘Putin consensus’ is not sustainable, even
though the argument that the President’s popularity relies on the absence of a
viable opposition is stronger.

Fragile Empire is an interesting book, occasionally let down by sloppy writing, but
it is certainly not the tired, anti-Putin hackery that Edward Lucas or Luke
Harding pump out. It’s a pity that Judah
didn’t concentrate on writing about the opposition and sharing snapshots of
ordinary people’s lives from some of Russia’s farthest flung corners. These passages form the most insightful material in the book rather than the second hand, cynical commentary of Putin’s years
in the Kremlin.

4 comments:

Thanks for this review. I was under the impression that this is a Gessen/Lucas type of clone, and so wasn't planning to bother with this book, but maybe I will now reconsider.

The problem I do indeed see is that if Judah is apparently able to swallow Belkovsky's claims about Putin's billions so uncritically - barring concrete evidence of his own, which from your review does not seem to be the case - is he capable of transmitting an actually unbiased and impartial account of normal Russian life, aka what the reviewers are all crowing over?

I have seen Judah's biases get in the way of his analyses before. For instance, in one article, he displayed Russia's ranking in the Corruption Perceptions Index, declining from c.80th to c.150th under Putin. What did he conveniently forget to mention? That the pool of surveyed countries doubled during the same period. If one is similarly selective about which anecdotes to tell and which not to tell, the result can be likewise misleading.

Thanks AK. You're right of course. It's not possible to judge what Judah may have omitted. He puts a fair amount of weight on an interview with Sergei Kolsnikov about off shore accounts and the Black Sea dacha which Putin is alleged to have built

I was struck though by Judah's implication that the problem lay with the 'power vertical' not being stringent or centralised enough, which isn't something I personally had read in other critical accounts.

While I'm sure he did ignore a lot of material which could have provided more balance I still thought he did a good job of a) capturing the mood and sentiment behind the protests b) explaining why they don't amount to a credible opposition movement.

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